It seems Apple has released an update to developers of the iPhone firmware. The improvements in firmware 2.1 are centered on the GPS functionality including speed and direction information.

There is also a rumor that the first beta of the push background notification for iPhone apps has been released to the wild. It will be interesting to see if it works better than the push email of MobileMe.

There has been a lot of news reports and blog posts concerning problems with Apple’s MobileMe service. Here are Walt Mossberg’s views on the service after a week of testing.

Overall he thinks it is a good idea but “….MobileMe has too many flaws to keep its promises.”

But in my tests, using two Macs, two Dell (DELL) computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem. One big issue is that while changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best. Apple has admitted that this is a problem, and says it is working on it.

His report finishes by saying that he thinks MobileMe “…could be a terrific service.” if Apple sorts out the problems. I think I will wait for that to happen before I give it a look.

MagicPad, from Proximi, is a text editor that is waiting for acceptance into the iPhone App Store. The reason the app is different from all the other note and text apps for the iPhone is that it features working cut & paste.

The function only works within the MagicPad app but at least we now know that it is possible to implement cut & paste on the iPhone. Hopefully the function will be available across all apps in the near future.